Geek Thoughts: Overrating the Low Usage / High Efficiency Player

Patrick Minton (@nbageek) wrote a fantastic post over at the NBA Geek — A Low Usage Myth. Between his post and some great followup in the comments, Patrick makes an amazing set of points I’d like to recap here.

Recently, when I talked about how good Andre Drummond is, a commenter objected that Drummond isn’t very good, because after all, like Tyson Chandler, he can’t get his own shot, and he only shoots when he’s wide open. And of course, we heard the usual lazy rhetoric about how the Points Over Par metric rewards guys who don’t shoot very much, which is, of course, why Kevin Durant is leading the league in wins produced (oh, wait).

The big problem is the underlying assumption that somehow only taking 7-10 shots a game, and dunking or laying in all of them is somehow easy. Somehow, Tyson Chandler isn’t really doing anything special when he rolls to the hoop for an alley-oop or when he makes backdoor cut for a lob dunk, or when he grabs an offensive board and puts it back in. That stuff’s easy, right? That must be why everybody in the NBA can do that!

A good question to ask is – how common is the Low Usage / High Efficiency player? Patrick tracked down 34 players this season that take 11 or fewer shots per 48 minutes. How many were above average in terms of efficiency? 12! That’s right, a majority of low usage players don’t shoot well. Alright, next question, how many low usage players have above average efficiency and are also valued by the Wins Produced / Points over Par metric? 8! Let’s also do a quick review (Season rank in Wins Produced listed in parens):

To reiterate, being a low usage, high efficiency player that is productive is not easy. You couldn’t even make a complete roster of players that fit the bill this season! What’s more, look at the distribution. Only one of the top 10 players this season falls under the category, and only three of the top 20!

Patrick sums this up well

So it turns out that “only shooting when you have a really good shot” or “only shooting when you have a layup or dunk” isn’t really a recipe for success. It’s not like Brendan Haywood and Ronny Turiaf didn’t get the memo. It’s more likely that they simply do not have the skills (or talents, I’m not going to start a nature-vs-nurture argument here) that Tyson Chandler has.

It turns out that just getting yourself a few dunks and layups per game is hard. And please don’t argue that it’s easy for Chandler because he plays with Melo. Take another look at this list. Kendrick Perkins also has a pretty good teammate getting lots of attention. Ronny Turiaf and Chris Duhan play with Kobe. Lamar Odom can’t seem to hit a shot anymore even though he plays with Chris Paul.

And Patrick follows up this point in the comments (which you may have missed as it is pretty buried)

1) that’s not what we are saying. To win basketball games, a TEAM needs to do four things: Not turn the ball over, shoot efficiently, rebound, and get and make free throws. That means, of course, you have to have some players who are good at these things.

2) it ignores the fact that you cannot win with 5 players like Carmelo Anthony. It’s pretty appropriate that we’re talking about the Knicks here, because trying to trot out 5 volume scorers is essentially what Isiah Thomas did. How’d that work out for you, Knicks fans?

I think Tyson Chandler is as good as Durant

…

They have entirely different roles. Part of what Points over Par captures is that these different roles are:

a) equally important to winning
b) based on SKILLS because the data shows that players tend to perform consistently over time, not randomly as one would expect if they weren’t skill based

The perception I am trying to fight is those of you who somehow are under the illusion that just because Chandler’s role is different from Durant’s, it is somehow easier. Which is, frankly, bull. If it were at all easy, lots of guys would be doing it, to grab the same huge 15m/year contract for doing what he does.

So to sum up – low usage / high efficiency players are rare. Even for those that exist, there aren’t a lot overwhelming the top rated Wins Produced players (consider that myth busted!) It’s like Patrick says, it takes certain skills to win in basketball. To be a good player requires excelling in one or more of those skills. And we notice not many players can do this. A good team requires a combination of those skills to win. We notice that many seem to assume players like Chandler are easy to replace, whereas players like Melo are not. The data doesn’t support this. And the other problem we notice is that people assume that things that players like Melo do are “harder” and thus “more valuable” than things like Chandler does. Except, the data doesn’t support this either. Patrick shows us a common theme around here: the assumptions held by many in sports don’t seem to hold up when we hit the data.

In all seriousness though, I think there are some interesting conclusions we can draw by looking at efficient low usage players, who they play with when/if they are efficient, and who they play with when/if they aren’t. This can help determine who is really a low-usage stud, and who is riding the coattails of great players/systems.

If they were the same age right now and playing at the current level, it would be Tyson for me. Given the reality of the situation it’s KD. But it’s a very,very interesting argument. I’d argue that your proven foundational pieces right now are: Lebron, KD, CP3, Tyson and Noah with a second tier (be it from youth,age or injury) of : KG,Harden, Faried, Duncan, Kidd with Drummond and Davis in the rookie tier.

and yes, I am having a mailing list conversation in the comments section. The post is that good Patrick :-)

This brings up points over par and maybe this is a time to ask a question about it. I have not seen a full description of POP, but as far as I can tell POP is the demeaned value of WP/48 based upon WP for each position in that year. Is this right?

I do not want to lay on any criticism of POP if I haven’t got this first step right. But in anticipation of being right or wrong, what does this metric tell us that WP does not already tell us?

Chandler is a pretty extreme example though. His shooting percentage is just so ridiculously high in comparison to NBA players on a historical perspective that it seems likely he isn’t exactly being evaluated entirely correctly by a model that is based on NBA averages. He is just off the charts. So no I would not take Chandler over Durant if I had to win just one NBA game tomorrow (so age is taken completely out of the equation). But I’ve seen the Knicks have no particular trouble winning games over the last two years when Melo has missed games. I don’t recall if that is the same when Chandler has missed games, but I suspect not.

Bob,
It’s a different way of viewing it. WP48 is concerned about wins produced for the season. POP48 converts that numbers to Point Margin. It also looks at how much better or worse a player is than the average and expresses it in points. It’s a really good way to translate the metric to impact.

While you obviously can’t win with a lineup of high volume, low efficiency gunners; how would a team composed of these WP favorites (low usage/low TO/high efficiency players) actually fair? How would a lineup of say; Tyson Chandler, Kenneth Faried, Ronnie Brewer, Jason Kidd, and Jose Calderon really flourish?

Fascinating question on that five. I think I’d like to see that group play. If they redistributed shots more evenly (i.e. didn’t try and force any player to be high usage) you have a good combination of inside and outside shooting at good rates as well as a great combination of other skills. Will have to examine that more.

I did a quick analysis of 5 of those top low usage guys. Think there’s a line to be drawn between production and value, although the two overlap much of the time. (Sefalosha outproduces Wade, Wade is more valuable). Read the article for the data and details.

Hoopdon,
So the only thing that would cause performance to change is a few teammates? You really want to make that argument? I appreciate your enthusiasm for trying to do analysis. But what I am seeing is a) you are not doing this very well b) you are very much overstating your conclusions. Not sure, though, how I can get you to see this. My experience is people who do statistical analysis poorly have trouble seeing that there is a problem.

Tried to post this last night, anyway there’s an interesting chart at Hickory High. It shows expected points based on where shots are taken and actual point per shot. Chandler takes highly efficient shots and is very good at it. The shot selection is probably in part by system design and points to a limited number of opportunities, but he’s also the best at taking those shots.

KD, on the other hand, takes average shots, but is incredible at making them +.24 points per play over expected. Perhaps KD could improve selection, but his shots are available every possession.

Teammates/System wouldn’t be the ONLY thing effecting player performance. However, I am prepared to say playing with Westbrook, Harden, and Durant significantly increased Sefalosha/Collison’s efficiency. Since the numbers I used in the article match-up with that hypothesis, should I believe something different?

Again, if you can point something out that I am doing wrong, we can have a discussion about it, and I’ll gladly update the article. The goal is to understand the game of basketball as well as possible, not for me to be right about everything. But saying I’m wrong because I’m wrong is sort of counter-productive.

Dre and Arturo, thanks for clearing that up. I now see it is a scaled by constants, I was initially thinking of this in terms of average player at the position (either as a median or averaged across players and not season totals). Now that I see what POP is, I just do not like the interpretation that that wins produced can be broken down to a game level interpretation. Since WP comes from season level data, projecting down to the game level is like taking weekly level data and projecting for each day. This isn’t meant to tear down POP, I just do not like the unit of projection.

And 31.1 seems like it should be obvious to me, but where is this coming from?

Arturo really would take Chandler over KD if they were both 25 at current level of production? Their current level is essentially even but shouldn’t Durant’s versatile offensive game at strong efficient levels get him the nod?

Question : Would a team comprised of high effiency low usage players be competitive
Answer : Linsanity showed us the answer. Landry Fields and TYson chandler got more playtime and more shots, shumpert and Novack found roles… and while lin wasnt a high eff/low usg player the other guys on the floor with him were